really obvious scurvy is seldom seen in industrialized nations. It usually is first seen as a sallow, muddy complexion in a person who suffers loss of energy, fatigue, and intermittent joint pains. Gums become sore and bleed. There are frequent nosebleeds and skin hemorrhages. Eventually, the skin becomes dingy and brown. Teeth loosen, old healed scars open, healing ceases, there is shortness of breath, and, soon after, death. Resistance to infections is also decreased. The Black Death was so terrible because it was superimposed upon preexisting scurvy.1 One-quarter of the population of Europe—25 million people—died. Even then, the common folk associated scurvy with lack of green plants.
The development of oceangoing wooden ships that could sail for many months at a time brought scurvy to the fore. Ships would sail from home with many more sailors than were required because so many would die at sea from scurvy; on some long voyages, half the crew would die. Even after James Lind proved that scurvy could be prevented by eating citrus fruit, it took the British Navy four decades to start issuing juice. The use of lemon juice, it was estimated, doubled the fighting force of the navy, but the forty-year delay cost 100,000 additional casualties.
The Board of Trade waited another seventy-two years before issuing citrus juice to its Merchant Marine. The U.S. Army became aware of it in 1895. Scurvy finally was beaten when Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) proved in 1931 that ascorbic acid was vitamin C. At first, he tried to call his white crystalline substance extracted from peppers “ignose,” because no one knew what it was. The editor of the journal to whom he submitted his paper rejected this, as well as Szent-Györgyi’s second suggestion, “Godnose.” For this discovery and other essential research, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937.
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